Data visualization applications enable a user to understand a data set visually, including distribution, trends, outliers, and other factors that are important to making business decisions. Some data sets are very large or complex, and include many data fields. Various tools can be used to help understand and analyze the data, including dashboards that have multiple data visualizations. However, data frequently needs to manipulated or modified to be put it into a format that can be easily used by data visualization applications.
Many types of data manipulation operations are required for users to prepare their data for analysis. In typical data flow applications, each operation is displayed to users as an individual unit, and a user is only permitted to perform a restricted set of operations within each such unit. As more operations are added, flow diagrams become very large an unwieldy, making it difficult for users to understand and/or modify.